Is taking children to church a form of child abuse?

[integral]

7 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Holy shit, maybe it's an INTJ type trait ? I think you are INTJ, if I am not mistaken.

I resisted all parts of schooling constantly 'I won't do this unless I see why, or where I can apply it'. I paid no attention and disregarded a lot of subjects for this reason.

My grades were atrocious. Until one day my Dad sat down with me and gave me the hard words. That even though I didn't see a use for what I was being taught, later on in life much of it would apply, I was just too ignorant and young to understand this. I needed to trust him, he said. 

My Dad is an engineer and construction manager. He taught me all about electrical work and low voltage DC circuits when younger (I learned PC building and software form him). I listened to him, because he knew his shit. He had applied knowledge I could see manifest in reality in concrete, tangible ways. He and my Grandfather were the only two family members I would listen to. 

At around 14 years old I decided I better learn this shit. Skipped a grade and was throttled into accelerated specialist, methods and general maths. Completed high school level maths in year 10. So I had only half load for my final 2 years prior to graduation. 

All my teachers, prior to applying myself, were trying to hold me back and concerned I had retarded development.

I was just an arrogant, pig headed INTJ who thought I was being forced into rubbish schooling that had no application 🤣🤣🤣

But it's a good case for minors needing guidance from parents. Neglect can be it's own abuse.

 

LMAO for sure its genetic.

Your story is very similar to mine, they even put me in special education because they thought i was retarded but at the same time i was already a chess master at 12, it made no sense to them, so they thought I had Asperger's. 

Really I identified that they were teaching me was completely useless, like French, and I had this Vision that chess was merging my brain hemispheres together strengthening my corpus callosum like the stories I heard of Einstein.

I was obsessed with being as intelligent as possible from a very young age, I prioritized intelligence over everything else but the education system put me in special education LMFAO. I took it as Pride that I was so intelligent that they mistook me for an idiot

And then like you I started applying myself and destroyed everything. Learning curriculum spread out in front of you is Child's Play.

Edited May 6 by integral

[Starlight321]

3 hours ago, Monster Energy said:

@Leo Gura 

It’s funny that you think there aren’t many downsides when school is designed to make people slaves to their own minds. It’s even funnier because you’re someone who claims to strive for enlightenment and to think outside the box.

 

 

@Monster Energyhalf the population is too stupid to make sense of the world even with school.  There are aspects like grades, curriculum and pressure which are harmful for children but cannot be avoided on our current level of developement (somebody has to do the dirty work). I have seen and talked to hundreds of alternative people with their alternative ideas which are destroying society more than our school system.

[Carl-Richard]

16 hours ago, Monster Energy said:

It’s not abuse because a healthy society needs rules.

School (or rather "education") is a rule, it's mandated by law; all but 11 countries in the entire world have it. And if you want people to follow the law, you need them to understand the law at a basic level and perhaps be able to read and write, and mandatory schooling is supposed to ensure that.

You could say "but I don't want schooling to be a rule", but then I would say you underestimate the impact of 200-300 years of mandatory schooling in the West and how it has created the well-functioning society you see around you.

School can be improved, but you would probably still want something similar to the current system if you want people to follow laws.

Interesting fun fact: Norway was the first country in the world to get mandatory education laws in 1739, beating Sweden by over 100 years lol.

 

16 hours ago, Monster Energy said:

School is abuse because it limits consciousness with false claims

As opposed to what? Consuming YouTube videos?

 

16 hours ago, Monster Energy said:

and teaches obedience instead of questioning. It’s not healthy.

Obedience was not a problem when you said society needs rules.

Edited May 6 by Carl-Richard

[sholomar]

No more or less than woke people trying to reassign their child a different gender at birth... the woke and the religious right are two sides of the same coin, both loony cults with loony people who have loony belief systems they want to force upon everyone else.   Don't kid yourself, there are plenty of socialist utopians here who would love to force some utopian autocracy on everyone against their will and think it would work when it wouldn't. 

Edited May 6 by sholomar

[Nemra]

Anyone who thinks that church attendance is needed and helpful to kids should reconsider their intelligence.

Kids mostly know belief-making, so if you don't want your kids to have fucked-up ideas about God and the world, don't make your kids attend church.

Church is not school.

Edited 12 hours ago by Nemra

[Lila9]

I don't know whether taking children to church would be considered abuse.

Maybe forcing children to go to church is, versus simply having it as an option for them.

Regardless, churches (or some other religious “holy places”) are among the most negatively charged places in the world, along with prisons, hospitals, psychiatric wards, casinos, cemeteries, and even schools.

Edited 3 hours ago by Lila9

[Monster Energy]

On 2026-05-07 at 0:15 AM, Carl-Richard said:

School (or rather "education") is a rule, it's mandated by law; all but 11 countries in the entire world have it. And if you want people to follow the law, you need them to understand the law at a basic level and perhaps be able to read and write, and mandatory schooling is supposed to ensure that.

You could say "but I don't want schooling to be a rule", but then I would say you underestimate the impact of 200-300 years of mandatory schooling in the West and how it has created the well-functioning society you see around you.

School can be improved, but you would probably still want something similar to the current system if you want people to follow laws.

Interesting fun fact: Norway was the first country in the world to get mandatory education laws in 1739, beating Sweden by over 100 years lol.

 

As opposed to what? Consuming YouTube videos?

 

Obedience was not a problem when you said society needs rules.

Thanks for the story, it was interesting.

Exactly, I said that society needs rules and obedience, but that they should also be questioned. It’s worse if obedience and rules exist and no one is even allowed to think about why things are the way they are. So my view isn’t black and white.

 

[Monster Energy]

8 hours ago, Nemra said:

Anyone who thinks that church attendance is needed and helpful to kids should reconsider their intelligence.

Kids mostly know belief-making, so if you don't want your kids to have fucked-up ideas about God and the world, don't make your kids attend church.

Church is not school.

Best comment in this thread so far.

 

[Monster Energy]

On 2026-05-07 at 1:23 AM, sholomar said:

No more or less than woke people trying to reassign their child a different gender at birth... the woke and the religious right are two sides of the same coin, both loony cults with loony people who have loony belief systems they want to force upon everyone else.   Don't kid yourself, there are plenty of socialist utopians here who would love to force some utopian autocracy on everyone against their will and think it would work when it wouldn't. 

This is the reality we live in; this is not a conclusion held by a minority of thinkers.

 

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Perhaps some more nuance to titrate out your views; do you disgree with teaching kids things they dislike, thus potentially creating a hatred and negativity to schooling in them? Turning them off structured education.

If we teach kids things that genuinely interest them, we foster a love of learning.

Or, are you more wary of any external structures being forced in those too young to consent?

[Monster Energy]

1 hour ago, Lila9 said:

I don't know whether taking children to church would be considered abuse.

Maybe forcing children to go to church is, versus simply having it as an option for them.

Regardless, churches (or some other religious "holy places") are among the most negatively charged places in the world, along with prisons, hospitals, cemeteries, and even schools.

 

For me, both scenarios are a form of abuse: one is unconscious when a person chooses to go to church, and the other is conscious when someone forces others to go.

 

Prison can feel like a better path for personal development than church, but that sounds very triggering and wrong. However, I would actually find it interesting to discuss this topic as well, because not many people talk about it.

 

[Monster Energy]

4 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Perhaps some more nuance to titrate out your views; do you disgree with teaching kids things they dislike, thus potentially creating a hatred and negativity to schooling in them? Turning them off structured education.

If we teach kids things that genuinely interest them, we foster a love of learning.

Or, are you more wary of any external structures being forced in those too young to consent?

I will always lean more toward freedom than limitation, but of course structure must exist, more accurately, it has to exist. However, it becomes a big problem when structure becomes so restrictive that it suppresses critical thinking or curiosity. I want all people to be able, at some point, to question what they have been taught and not become robots throughout their upbringing. That is completely wrong in my view, but unfortunately, that is how reality looks today.

 

[Willy Phallicus]

All religion is retarded and yet there are deep truths in all the holy books.

But the bullshit and manipulative history they teach in schools is somehow tolerable.

 

[Monster Energy]

3 minutes ago, Willy Phallicus said:

All religion is retarded and yet there are deep truths in all the holy books.

But the bullshit and manipulative history they teach in schools is somehow tolerable.

 

Sometimes it feels like none of the history that schools teach actually happened.

 

[Willy Phallicus]

1 minute ago, Monster Energy said:

Sometimes it feels like none of the history that schools teach actually happened.

I dont know what they put in the public education history books these days but when I was a kid they taught us a completely fabricated myth about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and being too honest to lie about it.  Why (rhetorical)? They taught that we fought a war of liberation over a tea tax (which the majority was completely against but the freakmasons were hot to get revolutionizing) yet somehow omitted that GW's first act as president was to march his army off to kill a bunch of civilians who had a problem with a whiskey makers tax.

They taught the founding fathers weren't actually genocidal elitist slave masters but men of great integrity and good will towards their fellow man.  Somehow Thomas Jefferson's posse of black sex slaves and Ben Franklins orgy cave didn't make it into mainstream history books.

Anyhoo, for anyone interested go read the works of John Taylor Gatto (an honest historian, not a conspiracy guy) about the history of the american public education system which was intentionally designed to create, as George Carlin put it, 'obedient workers' aka unquestioning wage slaves.

So yeah, its all bad, religion included.  Id posit that perhaps homeschooling your children on spiritual and worldly matters might be the way to go but Im sure someone would find a problem with that too.

[Lila9]

1 hour ago, Monster Energy said:

Prison can feel like a better path for personal development than church, but that sounds very triggering and wrong. However, I would actually find it interesting to discuss this topic as well, because not many people talk about it.

I suppose it depends on the prison, how strict it is, in which country, etc.

There are prisons so horrible, like the Black Dolphin in Russia. I don't know how far one can go with personal development there.

But even in the lightest prisons, there is the charged energy of all the crimes people committed (the karma and suffering they caused), their trauma, their mental disorders, the tired and overworked staff, and the distrustful, dog-eat-dog survival energy.

[Nemra]

The way that religions operate makes kids epistemically blind because kids are made to believe in things that are outside of belief from people who don't even know what they're talking about.

And the problem is that kids take things literally.

As a kid, believing that you'll burn your finger when touching the hot stove is an appropriate use of belief because adults know from experience that hot stuff will harm the skin.

Edited 2 hours ago by Nemra